This invention relates to distributed document services and, more particularly, to commercial distributed document services delivered using electronic networks. Document services can include, for example, printing, copying, scanning, interpretation, text and image recognition, editing, reproduction, binding, colorization, transmission (e.g., by facsimile or by electronic mail), mailing, storage (e.g., in microphotographic or digital form), retrieval, format conversion, authentication, searching (e.g., within a document or in a database of documents), shredding, recycling, disposal, and many others.
With the explosive growth of the Internet and, more generally, of electronic networks for computing and communication, it has become possible to conduct commercial transactions in a purely electronic forum. Conventional business transactions, as practiced in the non-electronic, non-networked world, can be emulated and sometimes automated or partially automated in the new electronic, networked world. Also, entirely new kinds of commerce can become possible--if they can be envisioned, and if mechanisms and techniques can be developed to enable and facilitate them.
A well-known commercial mechanism that is beginning to find its way into the new world of electronic networks is the auction. In particular, a brokered auction, in which a third-party auctioneer serves as an intermediary between customers and suppliers, can provide a way to allocate resources and set prices efficiently.
Several examples of electronic commerce and proposals for electronic commerce follow. Some of the examples involve auctions. In certain examples, the electronic "commerce" takes place in a simulated economy and is carried out with fictitious funds, the electronic equivalent of play money.
CommerceNet (Menlo Park, Calif.; http://www.commerce.net on the Internet's World Wide Web) is a consortium of companies that is working to promote electronic commerce on the Internet. According to an article in the Aug. 29, 1994 issue of Business Week, at page 14 ("Technology & You"), "CommerceNet hopes to make transactions work over the Internet so easily that a company in Palo Alto could put out a request for proposals in the morning, receive bids from all over the world by evening, and send out an electronic purchase order the next day." PA1 Agorics, Inc. (Los Altos, Calif.) describes itself as "a company that develops and markets software for the support of distributed applications. Agoric software systems manage the resources of computing networks using the mechanisms of market processes--auctions, price feedback, and supply and demand--in other words, an idealization of real economic markets." Agorics, Inc. asserts that in cooperation with Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Mountain View, Calif.), it has completed a project in which a real-time auction in ATM (asynchronous transmission mode) network bandwidth is used to support coexistence of ordinary network traffic with the delivery of digital video. PA1 An article co-authored by the inventor entitled "Spawn: A Distributed Computational Economy," which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 18, no. 2 (February 1992) at pages 103-117, describes an open, market-based computational system that uses idle computational resources in a distributed network of heterogeneous computer workstations. At page 106, the Spawn system is described as being "organized as a market economy composed of interacting buyers and sellers. The commodities in this economy are computer processing resources; specifically, slices of CPU time on various types of computer workstations in a distributed computational environment." Thus the Spawn system pertains to a simulated or fictitious marketplace for access to computational resources. PA1 U.S. Pat. No. 5,394,324, applied for by Clearwater and commonly assigned to the assignee of the present invention, is entitled "Auction-Based Control System for Energy Resource Management in a Building." According to the Abstract, the patent discloses "[a]n auction-based apparatus and method for supplying temperature conditioned air."
The document services industry has begun to enter the new electronic, networked world. For example, distributed document services such as distributed printing (as disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,287,194, incorporated hereinabove by reference) have become available. Even so, the industry's traditional inefficient pricing practices persist, to the detriment of both customers and suppliers.
Secretive and arcane pricing practices are, unfortunately, all too common in the document services industry, especially among providers of "high-end" (e.g., high-volume or very high-quality) document services. For example, suppose a customer wishes to have a special report professionally printed and bound in quantity. The customer provides the particulars of the job to a print shop, meets one-on-one with the shop's manager or service representative, and is quoted a price for printing, binding, and delivering the finished documents. If time permits, the customer may obtain a second price quote from a competing print shop. However, the customer's choice of geographically proximate print shops is likely to be quite limited. Moreover, even where there is a choice, the print shops are not likely to advertise their prices openly, at least not for large jobs. In short, both the customer and the print shops have limited information. The result is an economically inefficient market, in which resource allocation and pricing are suboptimal. A better way to establish prices for document services is needed.